By Claire Sprague | December 13, 2022

Recently I sat down with Dan Coughlin, Cofounder of Get Hyped, to discuss all things influencer marketing. AMR collaborates with Get Hyped to combine the power of influencers with content amplification through whitelisting and a robust organic social presence — and over the years we’ve seen amazing results together.

Our AMR team gets an insider peek at how influencer strategy and execution come together, so I wanted to pick Dan’s brain about how a small business should start to think about influencers, and what makes a campaign successful!

To start, tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to specialize in influencer marketing.

My background is definitely different than most most digital marketers! I got my degree in Electrical Engineering from Penn State and then engineered nuclear submarines for the US Navy. That training led me to become Vice President for a US Navy Supplier.

During that same time, my wife Kristina was in the financial services industry in business development and marketing. She was told to go on a gluten-free diet by a doctor and started creating healthy recipes on Instagram. Suddenly she fell into being a creator and started doing partnerships for brands to grow a following — she really loved it.

One of the brands that she was working with checked out her LinkedIn, saw her background, and was like, “Hey, would you consult with us on our influencer marketing strategy? We don't know what we're doing. We don't know how to work with influencers.”

She said, “Yes, absolutely!”

So Kristina started consulting for brands in the gluten-free space; helping them launch or scale their entire influencer strategy. We recognized that there was a huge opportunity, not just within being a content creator/influencer, but in the broader market.

We could combine my science-minded and results-driven engineering background with Kristina’s influencer marketing expertise to create a new solution in the social media space.

It started with: How do they pick influencers? How do they fully vet them? How do they handle outreach to potential influencers? But then it grew to putting that whole strategy in place and owning the whole process.

We were working with a lot of small businesses at the time and kept hearing, “The strategy is so great, but we really need help with the execution of it.”

Influencers are all so different — they have different expectations and different rates and different thoughts and do things in different ways. So it is very, very time-consuming to execute.

That’s how we formed our agency, Get Hyped. We realized brands didn’t have time to execute these campaigns. So now we handle the creation and execution of the entire influencer strategy for clients, and now I've been doing that for six years.

That IS awesome how you BOTH DISCOVERED YOUR PROFESSIONAL PATH through something you were doing personally. so many people struggle to figure out what they really enjoy doing.

As you know, AMR focuses on working with small businesses that are ready to take their social to the next level. Some of these businesses have been piece-mealing social execution together so far and created successful businesses along the way! How can you tell if a business is ready to add influencer marketing to the mix?

First, I like to see all of their other digital marketing efforts. Do they have an organic social strategy in place? What else are they doing from an overarching marketing standpoint?

Influencer marketing does best when it is part of an overarching marketing strategy. It's not a silo. You can’t leave it all to influencer marketing to achieve all the desired results.

The next thing that we look at is their budget in relation to their goals. A lot of times we see a brand that doesn't really have a budget but has really big goals. We always want to be realistic about what we can achieve. We want to make sure that they can allocate dollars for a 12 month+ period of time because, like most things, the more time you put into it, the more results you get out of it. It’s important to create long-term brand ambassador relationships with influencers because we all know consumers generally don't take action the first time they hear about a new product or service.

Influencer marketing is a really great way to feed the content creation machine — it drives brand awareness and also brand affinity. When people see influencers that they like, know, and trust, they actually feel like they can relate to your brand on a personal level.

It's a top-of-funnel activity, knowing that as you continue working with influencers, you will drive brand affinity. From there, we can retarget, we can amplify, and build conversions over time.

If a brand puts all its marbles into one influencer that is only going to post one time, it's not going to drive the results you're hoping for. We recommend a small amount of high-powered, perfect-fit evangelists who love the product or service, can organically talk about it, and have a really loyal audience. And, depending again on budget, most times we recommend a longer-term contract that really can build that trust with their audience.

If a brand doesn’t have the budget for an agency like Get Hyped to execute their campaign, Get Hyped offers a DIY solution called the Influencer Go To Market package that includes everything a brand needs to get ROI from influencers partnerships from the start. We also have a course in the works that will teach brands how to execute themselves.

So what types of brands are the best fit for these collaborations? Are there times when people come to you and say, “We want to do influencer marketing” and you dig in and realize that this isn't the right fit?

The big things are budget, goals, current social presence, and readiness in the market.

Is the brand currently selling its product and service well? If they’re a startup with a lot of kinks to figure out, like supply chain issues (which everyone is running into these days), struggling with the user experience of their websites, they haven't really sold anything yet, or they haven’t received any social proof that their product or service is going to work in the market, they might not be ready for influencers.

Influencer marketing is meant as a strategy to help amplify your growth efforts; not to create demand if that doesn't already exist. We're just one piece of the holistic marketing puzzle.

We work best with consumer brands who have been operational for at least a year with $1m+ in revenue. Generally, we want to see that there's some initial success with the brand, and then we can scale that success to the next level with influencers.

When I think about influencer marketing, I tend to think about skincare or clothing lines, but GET HYPED WORKS WITH SUCH A WIDE VARIETY OF BRANDS AND CATEGORIES. What are some of the incoming requests that you are surprised by?

We've worked with e-commerce, retail brands, digital apps — we work quite a bit in the tech and cybersecurity space. And you'd be surprised how many different influencer niches there are for different brands.

So when the cybersecurity client came to us, we thought, wow, this is a little bit different. And it turns out there are so many amazing cybersecurity and tech influencers that are worried about keeping their devices protected.

We usually end up looking at it from the perspective of their readiness versus the product itself. Most of the time, there's a fantastic group of influencers out there that could be a fit for even the most niche product or service.

Ok, so it sounds like any niche has possibility. I know there are micro-influencers, there are celebrities, there are brand advocates, etc. What are some of the components that your team considers when you're searching out ideal influencers?

For influencer size, it comes down to budgeting goals. There are no set parameters for what an influencer should charge depending on the size of their following. They might have a small following, but if their following is really engaged, they can charge a high amount.

A challenge is when brands say, “what size influencer can we get for this?” It’s really hard to go based on influencer size because someone could have a hundred thousand followers and have poor engagement, compared to someone who has half the amount of followers (or even less), and three times the engagement because their audience is more loyal.

So it is a little bit of the wild, wild west when it comes to pricing. We look at industry benchmarks (staying cautious of vanity metrics) and really focus on engagement. We've come up with a proprietary calculator that we use in-house to give us at least a rough benchmark of what would make sense for each individual influencer.

Some things to consider: are they a professional photographer and/or videographer? Are they in a specialized niche? If they are a doctor who's highly specialized but they don't have a huge following, they're going to charge more. There are a lot of other factors that come into play.

So it's a little bit of a combination of benchmark data and what the market's demanding.

So in determining influencers, we look at historical data based on the niche, the goals of the campaign, and realistically what type of influencers are going to drive the best results

for what this client's looking for.

We also note if a client is looking for more content generation. In that case, we might go with really amazing content creators and not care as much about their reach. If a client is looking for brand reach and maximizing performance, then we look at audience demographics, engagement rate, views, and all the backend metrics to make sure that's aligned with the ideal customer.

All of those things you LISTED REALLY ILLUSTRATE why it is very hard for an internal team to try to tackle influencer marketing. There's so much to it. And it's very different than the rest of the marketing initiatives that teams are typically working on.

What advice do you have for brands that are ready to dip their toes into the influencer arena?

First, do some research on the space and get educated. Get to the point of being really comfortable (knowing enough to be dangerous) when it comes to influencer marketing.

Have some level of buy-in into the strategy. We've seen some brands that just want to dip their toe and they get dip-their-toe in results. We're always going to get results relative to the investment and the time duration you're willing to put into it.

Second, figure out if you need to outsource it. If you're doing a small-scale initiative, try to see if you can do it in-house first. You'll get a lot of learnings that way. Like I mentioned earlier, we’re working on a course that teaches marketers everything we’ve learned in the past six years of operating influencer campaigns for consumer brands.

If you're trying to make this a serious part of your digital marketing strategy, bring on experts — they take most of the trial and error out of it. In the beginning, especially when you're testing different influencers on your own, there will be ups and downs when you test different influencer partnerships. We can help minimize that.

And then also expect to put in a time commitment. Even if you're having someone else do it for you, it is going to take some time for the entire strategy to come to life, especially if you're looking for bottom-of-the-funnel activity.

Let the influencers do their thing. Give influencers creative freedom to make organic content that really resonates with their audience. I've never heard of a brand that's invested in influencer marketing long-term that hasn't seen amazing results from it. But it does take patience.

Absolutely. Going back to what we talked about earlier, it’s a long game. Consumers need 7 to 10 touch points before making a purchase decision, and an influencer can't put those in one month and feel authentic to their audience — that has to be spread out.

SO MUCH HAS changed in the last couple of years with COVID — we've seen in-person and brick-and-mortar LOCATIONS COMPLETELY go away. this means thAT A BRAND’S organic social presence becomes even more important. Are there any tRENDS that you're seeing in terms of influencer marketing that you wanted to highlight?

I'd say the big trend, of course, is an explosion of video content. It's so huge. TikTok is exploding. Instagram is pushing Reels. YouTube Shorts launched. This is a great reason to work with influencers because many brands don't have in-house capabilities to create a ton of video content. They can use influencers to create video content while also maximizing brand awareness and reach. I don't see that trend going away anytime soon.

The storytelling capability is huge — now, you're seeing just so much more authentic,

real life, real-time storytelling where it's not overly curated. People are really resonating with that more than ever before. We're seeing this shift in perspective for brands that used to want to work with a perfectly well-curated influencer. Now they want to work with influencers that are real, authentic, and just speak from the heart.

I look at some of these campaigns that have huge production costs with big name people, huge camera crews, etc, and then you look at some of these smaller, micro to midsize influencers that are recording on their phone and connecting with their audience and doing an amazing job. It's democratizing who can speak about products.

Brands are steering away from working with a lot of influencers and finding those amazing best-fit creators who do authentic storytelling and signing longer-term contracts. Brands can give smaller influencers guidelines while also giving them creative freedom to create organic content that's gonna work with their audience, and then letting them have fun with it.

Interested to know more about Influencer Marketing? You are in the right place. We work with our partners at Get Hyped to create organic social and influencer marketing strategies that work together to amplify your brand. Reach out today to find out more!

Images from: GetHypedMedia.com

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